'You can't separate it from Syracuse'

Charlie Marvin's father, Rollie, was a longtime mayor
of Syracuse. Charlie is 83, but he can remember traveling as
a child to the Bahamas, where his family went to eat at the
British Colonial Hotel.

In the restaurant, Charlie and his sister, Irene Kathryn,
immediately did what they always saw the grownups do: They
flipped over the plates at their table, looking for a most
distinctive label.

They hit the jackpot. The plates were made by Syracuse
China. They realized they were holding a talisman from home.

"It's just a part of our history, a part of our
makeup," Charlie said.

Or at least it was, until this week.

Syracuse China is closing. The announcement was made
Tuesday. Every factory shutdown is painful in our region,
especially with the national economy crumbling around us.
Yet the loss of Syracuse China is a body blow. It was a
blue-collar place, an industrial institution, whose
employees made a durable, beautiful product that was used
around the world.

It also accounted for the practice at the heart of the
Turner-Over Club, also sometimes known as the Turn-Over
Club.

"Everybody talked about it," said Charlie Marvin,
who remembers how Central New Yorkers, as they traveled
around the state or around the world, would flip plates or
coffee cups to see if "Syracuse China" was marked
on the bottom.

Flipping plates became so common that the company, in the
1940s, began handing out cards to employees and customers
that designated them as Turner-Over Club members. The first
cards were made of paper, although later cards were made of
plastic, like credit cards.

It was all in good humor, although it spoke to a specific
point of pride.

"The idea was that if you were in a restaurant and you turned over the plate, and someone wondered what you were doing, you could show them the card as a way of saying you had authorization because you were from Syracuse," said Dennis Connors, curator of history at the Onondaga Historical Association....